LA REVOLTE DES LYCĖES. #analyse

On September 30, in front of the Balzac high school, Maë, 16 years old, is hit in the face by a projectile and loses the use of her right eye, with injuries consistent with a tear-gas gun shot. A 14-year-old boy had his jaw broken by a close-range grenade launcher shot.

On television, people speak of riots, chaos, manipulated kids, vandals and thugs—words we have heard many times before in history.

• 1871: Adolphe Thiers telegraphs the prefect after the crushing of the Paris Commune • 1966: 63% of Americans have a negative opinion of Martin Luther King, now honored with a national holiday • 1976 in Soweto: police shoot at Black middle and high school students; June 16 is now a holiday • 1987: Margaret Thatcher calls Mandela's ANC a terrorist organization; Mandela receives the Nobel Peace Prize six years later

Not all suppressed movements enter history, but many current rights were won by people called vandals or terrorists. No power yields out of politeness—it yields to a balance of power, almost always criminalized by elites, politicians and mainstream media.

It all begins at Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil: teachers strike due to lack of colleagues, a social worker and a psychologist, then about 200 students block their school to support them. An interview posted on TikTok reaches 1.5 million views.

• A dozen high schools, then 180, then 338 • October 1: 1,027 schools affected according to the Interior Minister • The movement spreads to universities, Belgium, Liège and other cities

Teachers, classes with fewer than 35 students, toilets with doors, toilet paper and soap, classrooms with bearable temperatures year-round, a school nurse. According to an Odoxa poll for Le Figaro, 62% of French people judge the movement justified.

The government speaks of maneuvers by LFI and the far left, based on an intelligence memo never published. On October 2, over 400 high schools are closed and prefects ban protests at their entrances.

• Paul-Éluard High School in Saint-Denis: flooding, collapsed ceiling in 2023, rats, students in prefabs above 30°C • Montpellier: 9°C in January, 36°C in September, classes cancelled • Over half of secondary school buildings date from before 1980

Of 50 million euros promised to adapt schools to heat, 40 million were frozen last summer.

At the start of the school year, at least one teacher was missing in 53% of public middle and high schools (SNES-FSU survey), and one class hour in 10 is not covered—especially where students are poorest.

In 1980, a beginning teacher earned 2.2 times the minimum wage versus 1 time today: the profession has been devalued by half.

• Between 2019 and 2023: +60% of 12–25 year-olds on antidepressants • Hospitalizations for self-harm or suicide attempts nearly doubled among girls aged 10–19 • One-third fewer child psychiatrists in 12 years; one school psychologist per roughly 1,500 students

3114 in France (free, day and night) and 0800 32 123 in Belgium.

79% of teenagers are optimistic about themselves, but only 36% for their country and 31% for the world. 74% of young French people find their future frightening; nearly one in five young people lives below the poverty line, and 84% of 16–25 year-olds don't feel heard.

In response, they are offered uniforms, authority, military service and climate rollbacks. The Education Minister has her three sons at Stanislas, Paris's select private high school: it's the empathy gap, structural indifference rather than malice.

French debt reaches 3,600 billion euros, or 119% of GDP. In 2027, the state will pay more in interest (73 billion) than for the entire Education ministry outside pensions (65 billion).

• Since 2017, debt has grown by over 1,300 billion; Covid is estimated at 165 billion by the government • According to the Court of Auditors, tax cuts since 2018 represent 62 billion in lost revenue in 2023 • Abolition of the wealth tax and flat tax on capital income

According to France Stratégie, dividends paid to households rose from 14 to 23 billion per year, with no detected effect on investment or wages. The richest 0.1% pocket 62%, and the 500 largest fortunes rose from 711 to 1,076 billion.

A 2% minimum tax on estates over 100 million euros, affecting 1,800 households, worth 5–25 billion per year—rejected. With 5 billion, nearly 100,000 teachers could be paid for a year, while the 2027 budget cuts 1,588 posts for about 83 million euros.

In 1947 in Switzerland, economists around Friedrich Hayek propose the idea that the market works better than the state: neoliberalism. Its first laboratory is Pinochet's Chile in 1973, with the Chicago Boys.

High school students revolt against this system: the penguin revolution in 2006, and in 2019 subway turnstile hops with the slogan 'it's not 30 cents, it's 30 years.'

Macron is not a Chicago Boy, but a neoliberal in the scholars' sense: manage the state like a start-up, cut spending, hire contractors and gift money at the top hoping it trickles down.

Resources are finite; nine planetary boundaries may already be exceeded according to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and growth is slowing. When the pie stops growing, those at the top take a bigger slice: this is scarcity capitalism, with a double burden for high school students (financial and ecological debt).

Neuroscientists have abandoned the cliché of the unfinished brain. At this age, the brain is wired for social connection: in Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's experiment, exclusion hurts teens far more than adults.

According to Laurence Steinberg, a teenager alone takes no more risks than an adult, but in front of peers they do. Researchers call this prosocial risk-taking: defending someone, opposing unjust authority, feeling useful.

What moves a teenager is respect and a sense of justice, facing leaking ceilings, never-replaced teachers and insults on TV.

• 1986: the Devaquet law is withdrawn after Malik Oussekine's death • 1990: the same demands as today; the movement starts in Saint-Denis and wins 4.5 billion francs • A power that must strike its own children to hold on loses legitimacy

October 1 in Liège, a dozen schools are blocked; the next day the city closes all its secondary schools and the movement spreads to other cities. Students say, as in France, they are there for their teachers.

The Wallonia-Brussels Federation wants 500 million in savings by 2029, with more unpaid hours, over 1,000 posts cut and 20 months of teacher strikes.

The minister speaks of instrumentalization and methods imported from France, without specifying who she means: the same discourse as in France.

In Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, Generation Z toppled governments, but in Madagascar the military took power: a revolt alone is not enough—you need a project.

Power and part of mainstream media criminalize the movement to strip it of legitimacy: a legitimate movement calls for a response; a vandal movement gets repressed.

In 1990, Republican Newt Gingrich circulated a memo on language as a control mechanism. In France, words like thug, riot, mob, savage, scum serve to make the other an enemy—all the more easily when the school is in the suburbs.

This omnipresent high school representative on TV denouncing political cooptation is no longer a high school student according to Bon Pote and Contre-Attaque. He allegedly became a consultant on September 21 at Minerva, an agency headed by an advisor to Gabriel Attal, and his association is tied to an LR activist.

This looks like astroturfing, a fake grassroots voice. Fake news exists on the other side too (gassed baby in Nice), but Viginum detected no artificial manipulation of the movement.

In December 2018 in Mantes-la-Jolie, 151 young people are put on their knees, hands on heads, in front of Saint-Exupéry high school; a police officer comments 'there's a class that knows how to behave.' Justice rendered a dismissal in 2025.

• Maë, 16, loses the use of her right eye • A 14-year-old boy's jaw is fractured by a grenade launcher shot • Over 5,000 arrests in 5 days, nearly 9 out of 10 minors • The minister speaks of thugs and delinquents and using all intermediate weapons

According to Weber, the state claims a monopoly on legitimate violence, but this legitimacy must be earned. For Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott, treating a crowd as an enemy pushes the peaceful behind the more radical.

A high school hallway burned in Nantes, a fire truck burned in Marseille and assaults are unacceptable, but according to prosecutors the perpetrators are mostly minors without records, often outsiders to the schools. High school organizations disown them.

The Acrimed media watchdog timed France 2 news broadcasts over 4 days: 19 minutes on violence versus 1 minute 56 on demands.

According to political scientist Erica Chenoweth, what makes a social movement successful is on average size and duration, not fire.

Each fire is a gift to those who want to discredit the movement, by talking about flames instead of ceilings. What scares them is a large, calm, patient and determined movement.

For Vince, these images of peaceful mobilization are the definition of liberty, equality, fraternity.

October 1: the 2027 budget planned to charge non-scholarship students for vocational and preparatory programs. That same evening, the government withdrew it and the minister cited the mobilization of high school students.

One that judges school too expensive but refuses 2% Zucman tax on the 1,800 richest households, freezes the heat plan and sends tear-gas guns. It will defend itself with batons, TV shows and words like thug, scum, terrorist.

Quoting Gramsci: 'The old world is dying, the new cannot be born, and in this interregnum there arise monsters.' The other way starts from a finite planet: choose what matters (functioning schools, fairly paid teachers, adapted buildings, mental health, shared wealth).

When the pie stops growing, sharing becomes a matter of democratic survival: hoarding or sharing, turning point or decline.

In France, presidential election in spring 2027: many current high school students will vote for the first time; verify registration on service-public.fr. In Belgium, write to local and national elected officials about teachers and buildings.

A ballot cannot replace a movement, but a movement without ballots ends up being circumvented and corrupted.

Acting together best protects against helplessness. 'You are not the problem, you are the future': in 1986 and 1990, high school students made governments back down.

We will remember the generation that refused to stay quiet in a world on fire. Vince invites sharing the video and commenting with the word 'revolution.'